Product description

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE(R) IN LITERATURE 2013
In the thirteen stories in her remarkable second collection, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that led no less a critic than John Updike to compare her to Chekhov. The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future.

Author information

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published thirteen collections of stories as well as a novel, "Lives of Girls and Women, "and two volumes of "Selected Stories." During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada's Governor General's Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England's W. H. Smith Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories have appeared in "The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Granta, "and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.

Review quote

"Munro, the hugely gifted chronicler, is fast becoming one of the world's great totemic writers. . . . Each short story is a mansion of many rooms." -"The New York Times Book Review"
"How honest and how lovely. . . . A spellbinding tour through a world of love, menace and surprise. . . . [Munro] is a writer of enormous gifts and perception." -"Los Angeles Times"
"Wonderful. . . . A sheer pleasure." -"Seattle Post-Intelligencer"
"A rich exploration of womanhood. . . . A more supple, honest, sensitive and sympathetic imagination would be hard to find among writers of fiction today." -"Ms."
"Masterful . . . proves beyond question Alice Munro's trenchant ability to capture the essence of personality in the vagaries of human impulses. . . . It is hard to imagine a perception more acute." -"Houston Post
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Praise from fellow writers:
"Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does." --Jhumpa Lahiri
"She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion." --Jonthan Franzen
"The authority she brings to the page is just lovely." --Elizabeth Strout
"She's the most savage writer I've ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive." --Jeffery Eugenides
"Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can."--Julian Barnes
"She is a short-story writer who...reimagined what a story can do." --Loorie Moore
"There's probably no one alive who's better at the craft of the short story." --Jim Shepard
"A true master of the form." --Salman Rushdie
"A wonderful writer." --Joyce Carol Oates

Flap copy

In the thirteen stories in her remarkable second collection, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that led no less a critic than John Updike to compare her to Chekhov. The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future.

Table of contents

Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You
Material
How I Met My Husband
Walking on Water
Forgiveness in Families
Tell Me Yes or No
The Found Boat
Executioners
Marrakesh
The Spanish Lady
Winter Wind
Memorial
The Ottawa Valley